January 2010

Hello 2010...

2 January 2010, 09:44

Already a “new” year, and a day, but were is the “new” besides a couple of numbers?

New is the snow falling since yesterday evening. Poetically perhaps, if you make abstraction of the fact that it is simply part of a cycle, but in fact it was rain and there was nothing new about it until it started to snow towards the end of the day…
Rattlebrained Designs New Shop Blog

3 January 2010, 12:40

Hope you like the blog’s new look, it happened yesterday while working on my newly started Rattlebrained Designs Shop Blog which will hopefully bring some traffic over there. I plan to make a musical washboard playing page and possibly one for rhythm bones as well.

I’ve also been working on Rattlebrained Rags my main shop at Zazzle, business has been picking up there, a good sign.
Y'a Pas De Photo!

5 January 2010, 10:10

I’ve been having problems getting good pictures of my latest art works with my aging Olympus C-8080. It just doesn’t have the definition to get all the variations on white these works have to print a large size image. Since funds are low I was curious as to what quality pictures one of those newer “cheep” and portable cameras boasting over 10 mega pixels would have and so it was convenient (to me) that E. had to buy one for her work…
Bot Bones!

6 January 2010, 13:05

Scott Miller, who is the guy behind one of my favorite stores on the web Bone Dry Music contacted me last fall about a new kind of rhythm bones he was developing and would I be interested in creating a logo? Would love too! was my answer of course as I began to work on his idea: a robot hand playing metal bones.
You can read the whole story of how Bot Bones came to be on the store’s Bot Bones information page; they are metal rhythm bones currently made from aluminum (with copper, brass and stainless steel still in the works).

I’ve had a pair of medium (1“x6 1/2”) aluminum Bot Bones for two weeks now and I really, really like them. As an intermediate bones player I’d place them among the “easier” bones to play…
The Sounds Of Bones

7 January 2010, 15:35
Bones Solo #2 by Greg Burrows

8 January 2010, 10:35

I sent yesterday’s Sound of Bones video to my friend Bill Holden another local American artist who is a Jazz musician and also organizes workshops for kids of all ages to create, and play, homemade instruments…
Coon Hunt Walk Around/Charleston Gals

12 January 2010, 08:54

So far, the few rhythm bone videos I’ve posted were all bone “solos” so I wanted to finish this last week’s small incursion into to the world of bone rhythms with an example of bones played with another instrument: in this case a reproduction Civil War era banjo is played by Carl Anderton accompanied by Scott Miller on the bones…
Back To Bronze?

14 January 2010, 22:23

It’s been nearly seven years since I’ve had anything to do with bronze and it’s not yet clear if today’s just a passing burp or something longer lasting, but the fact is I was tired of stepping over the few works unfinished that have been lying around my studio since that far ago date before this blog when for many reasons and pretty much overnight I decided to stop with the bronze and did.

However since I didn’t actually work on either of these pieces, a fact rare enough to mention (since then I’ve always done the chiseling, sanding and patinas myself), but picked two of them off the floor, drove them over to the founder’s and said: finish them…
HERO RATS

17 January 2010, 12:49

About a year and a half ago I stumbled on the Hero Rat website and was very impressed, but as one often does I put it aside for later and forgot all about it. Until last January (‘09) that is, when it popped into my mind that even I could afford the 5 Euro (just over $7) monthly fee of adopting a rat. So I did.

Kim is one of the 5 “symbolic” rats that you can adopt, actually from what Ive gathered looking through their info there are at least 300 rats being trained or doing what they’ve been trained for. In Kim’s case this means detecting tuberculosis, which she does well! Last September in Tanzania where they work for instance these rats found 70 patients with active TB that were missed by microscopy!…
Darned Patinas!

18 January 2010, 12:17

Thursday I ~~spoke~~ wrote to soon!
On the way to the foundry I realized that I had forgotten to take note of the edition numbers and dates of the two works but turning around meant loosing the whole morning and it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had to stamp the date on a bronze that had already received its patina… On Friday of course the stamp slipped, scratching the surface….
Chlefele

24 January 2010, 17:06

One of the main problems with blogging is that when you have lots of stuff to blog about it often means that you have a lot to do which means you don’t have much time to blog… And so it has been the last few days, so hopefully (do I really want that?) life will calm down enough to catch up (no).

A few weeks ago I finally joined the Rhythm Bones Society, something I had been wanting to do for a while, and with their greetings I received one of their newsletters of a few years back in which there was an article about Klepperle / Chefele “rhythm bones” from south eastern Germany and north eastern Switzerland. I found that kind of funny, all the more since I had never heard of them nor had anyone who saw me play around here said: hey, that’s like an instrument they play in certain parts of German speaking Switzerland”… OK, so it’s a fact that the linguistic parts of Switzerland are culturally further apart than mere distance measured, but still…
Blues for Haiti @ the Café Omega

28 January 2010, 09:48

Last Thursday I had hoped to go down to Geneva and jam at the BAG but circumstances decided otherwise and I ended up at the Café Omega over in the small village of Cortébert with Blaise for a jamming evening of Blues to raise funds for Haiti.

One thing you get living in small villages and towns up here in the Jura Mountains is a certain feeling of emptiness which on a dark frozen snow covered winter night can make the rest of the world seem a figment of the imagination. So it’s always a special thing to leave the void of the outside, the secret filled black windowed houses lit by two or three streetlights that painfully cast their feeble luminosity through the misty air, and enter the overheated and people packed room of an open café…
Crawfish Blues @ The Blues Club Fribourg

29 January 2010, 11:35

Gosh, darn! Forgot to post this flier for our next concert which is already tomorrow!

Since Dave is off to New Zealand again it might be the last gig for a while, come one, come all!